Snapask, Hong Kong entrepreneur Timothy Yu’s Uber-like tutoring app, now has 2 mn users

Representational Image (Flickr)

Education technology applications that involve online tutoring started gaining more popularity in the past two years, which is exactly when Snapask started moving in the fast lane too. The on-demand education app was dubbed the “Uber for tutoring” shortly after it emerged on the scene in 2015.

The company has made over $20 million in funds already.

The founder and CEO of the application, Timothy Yu, embraced the title instead of questioning it because he realised the healthy comparison meant his application was providing the same kind of convenience to the users.

According to a CNBC report, the Hong Kong-based startup began its journey with about 1,00,000 students but is now two-million users strong.

Four years on, the platform now connects students with the best of tutors for interactive sessions. There are 2,50,000 educators who are currently associated with the online education platform. The app is available in eight countries as of now, namely Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. It now handles approximately two million questions per month and has 80 direct employees who handle Snapask’s operations.

So, how does the “Uber for tutoring” app work?

Snapask requires students to upload their questions or photos of their problem on the app. Then, algorithms fed into the platform identify the type of question and alert the tutor best suited to answer it.

The first one to respond among those shortlisted tutors then get on to the one-on-one messaging session with the student. The platform has software that assesses the response of the tutor for quality control.